


Pink is the new kind of lingo

by Aja



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Dom Cobb Being an Asshole, Epithets, M/M, Starbucks, fake boyfriends, the pink drink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 18:16:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7233433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wholly inspired by <a href="http://bookshop.tumblr.com/private/145945354788/tumblr_o8fm7cGflS1spmorm">this Tumblr post</a>: "imagine your OTP: person A works at starbucks and is stuck in strawberry acai hell and has been making Pink Drink damn near non-stop ever since Buzzfeed <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/caseyrackham/starbucks-pink-drink-is-the-song-of-the-summer">wrote an article on it</a>, and person B is the poor soul who orders the Pink Drink that is The Last Straw."</p><p>Seriously have you ever heard a prompt that called out more keenly for an Arthur/Eames response?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pink is the new kind of lingo

If the man who ordered Arthur’s five thousand eight hundred and sixty-fifth Pink Drink weren’t actually wearing a flamingo-pink shirt.

If he weren’t also wearing a tie with _orange and yellow polka dots_.

If his threadbare grey wool coat didn’t have a purple and green paisley handkerchief dangling out of the pocket, and if the smile he fixed Arthur across the counter wasn’t totally stunning and sunny and gorgeous and utterly devoid of any knowledge whatsoever that he was a walking affront to everything Arthur held dear about his life and that asking Arthur to make his five thousand eight hundred and sixty-fifth goddamn trenta - _trenta!_  - strawberry acai was tantamount to asking Arthur to walk outside and lay down in traffic (because in that moment Arthur was absolutely  _sure_  that he could, would, and should to get away from the utter vast absurdity that was his life). 

If it hadn’t been for all of that happening at once, on the same day that Arthur had been turned down for the management promotion he’d been patiently waiting for for over a year, the promotion that he’d earned a thousand times over (even without all those goddamned pink drinks), because Cobb had decided to hire a fucking _rich philosophy major_ over him, a philosophy major  _straight out of grad school,_  newly immigrated and trying to _find herself_ , just because she was French and Cobb wanted to bang her, Arthur might have gotten through it. 

He might have been able to make the damn drink. He might have even mustered up a cheery Starbucks greeting for the walking joke across the counter. And then he might have clocked out when his shift ended and gone home and searched fruitlessly for jobs, any jobs, and cursed the fact that no one but Cobb wanted to hire a mouthy beanpole with no references, no real experience, and only a GED. And then he might have given up and come back to work the next day just like always, and he might have been okay.

Instead, Arthur stared. And stared, for so long that the man across the countertop, still smiling, cleared his throat and said, “Oh! Sorry, mate, it’s my accent, sometimes it’s a bit thick,” and fucking _repeated his order_  with that sickening ludicrous grin still plastered on his face like a comedy mask. As if the problem was actually that Arthur was _hard of fucking hearing_.

“Make it yourself,” Arthur bit out finally.

“Beg pardon?” said the technicolor douchebag.

“Make it,” Arthur snarled, undoing his apron and folding it very deliberately before laying it on the countertop in front of him, “yourself.”

It was a late evening and there were only a few other patrons in the shop. Cobb was in the back talking on the phone just as he always was. The man across the counter didn’t seem taken aback in the slightest; instead he watched interestedly as Arthur dug through his pockets for the ring of keys Cobb had gifted him with months ago, when Arthur began opening the store every morning — and more often than not doing double shifts and closing it down, too, because Cobb liked to concoct emergencies to get out of the store as much as possible.

The man in technicolor eyed him as he laid the keychain and the keys on the counter along with the recipe list for the Secret Menu, the Sunset Menu, and last year’s Secret Menu, because Arthur had sworn never to have to ask a customer to explain to him what a drink order was. No more. Never again would he have to wait while some terrified n00b stared at the menu over his head with increasing confusion written all over their faces. Never again would he be snapped at by professionals in all black firing their drink orders at him like bullets; never again would he be chatted up by hipsters in handlebar mustaches just because he didn’t judge them openly enough for their soy kale smoothies. _Never again._

 _Hasta la barista_ , he thought viciously.

And then, just as Arthur was about to storm out from behind the espresso machine and simply walk away, the man across the counter grabbed the recipe list and _hopped over the counter to join him_. 

Arthur blinked, and then to his horror heard himself stammer, “What—hey, you can’t be behind here.” He was built, his muscles thick all the way from the trunk of his torso to his broad shoulders; Arthur had no idea how he’d managed to slide over the bar so easily, how he’d managed to make the movement look so graceful. 

“Sure I can,” said the man. Jocular. He was _jocular_. Arthur’s horror grew. “You’re leaving, and you did tell me to make it myself.”

Arthur eyed him. The technicolor lumberjack leant down and grabbed a plastic cup from behind the counter. Arthur was tempted to walk out anyway—after all, he was right, Arthur had left him to his own devices—but then the lumberjack started _whistling_ , and what little control Arthur had over his own life vanished.

“No, stop,” he hissed, “Stop it, you’ll—stop _whistling_ , and let me at least start the—the blender.” He grabbed the plastic cup and got an eyebrow raised at him for his pain.

“The blender,” repeated the lumberjack, and the smile was abruptly gone; in its place was an air of faint disdain and incredulity.

Arthur stiffened. “It’s dangerous,” he said with dignity. He refused to be mocked by a man with three-day-old scruff wearing a polka dot tie — even if the scruff looked really good on him. “And you clearly have issues with your eyesight.”

He had just quit his job over a stranger in a clown suit, he could afford to be vicious, he reminded himself. But still he winced at the look that came over Emmet Kelly’s face.

“If you’re referring to my choice of attire,” the lumber-clown said, suddenly more British than he had been a moment before—and that definitely didn’t make Arthur shiver as he busied himself with the coconut milk and the freeze-dried strawberries—“I was attending a five-year-old’s birthday party. I had to stand out amongst the balloons.”

“You _were_  the balloons,” Arthur muttered, dumping the acai mix in with the rest of the ingredients and shoving them into the blender.

“You forgot the extra shot of protein,” the lumberjack beamed at him. “I may be full of hot air, but I never stint on nutrition.”

Arthur glared at him and reached for the protein pump.

"And the shot of white chocolate," the lumberjack said. His expression had not changed. Arthur could feel his own glare sharpening in response.

"You didn't _order_ a shot of white chocolate," Arthur said.

"Oh, didn't I? I must have forgotten. Don't worry, I'll ring myself up correctly!"

He had crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, Arthur noticed. They were dazzling — some weird in-between hue of hazel and blue. Arthur noticed that, too. And Arthur noticed he had cushiony, raspberry-pink lips the approximate shade of this drink he was making.

Even his face was technicolor.

He pumped in the protein, scowling now, and reached to do the same for the white chocolate. But the area behind the counter in Cobb's Starbucks had never been roomy, and somehow the technicolor lumberjack seemed to take up most of it with his broad shoulders, so that Arthur wound up dodging at the last moment to maneuver around him, while he felt that opaque grin slide into something that made Arthur's face heat up. 

"What's a wiry, bitter thing like you doing behind the counter at a place like this?" The lumberjack's voice had suddenly dropped to a low simmer, and Arthur felt a shiver starting low in his spine.

The two of them were wedged neatly between the counter and the cabinets, and Arthur was suddenly acutely aware that the technicolor lumberjack was thicker all older than he'd first realized. The incongruity of that body and that voice and that smile and that face on a man that demonstrably ridiculous suddenly struck Arthur as the worst injustice that had happened to him all day, on top of all the others, and he snapped, "Getting your order instead of dashing it in your face and walking out like I planned. The least you could do is shut up and stand back and give me some fucking room."

The lumberjack finally lifted his other eyebrow and continued as if Arthur hadn't spoken at all. "You don't ever taste any of these drinks you make for other people, do you? Is it really all that much work and no play? It's a Starbucks, for god's sakes, not Wall Street."

Arthur's blush and his scowl grew deeper together. "Fuck off," he said as he bent to reach the syrups, managing to find the white chocolate at last.

"Why?" said the lumberjack. He took the syrup bottle from Arthur and poured the shot in himself. "So you can walk out on your job and go back to surfing Reddit and being the best player on your Halo team and angsting over whether to put your photo on Grindr and eating dry corn flakes out of the box while you apply for jobs you're far too intelligent to do but far too underqualified to get?" He kept pouring in the syrup while he was talking, heedless of any common decency about what constituted a 'shot,' and finally ended by twisting the bottle and setting it down with a flourish. 

Arthur fought to keep any visible reaction from his face but his anger at this man suddenly went much deeper than annoyance.

"Let me guess," he said, shoving the sloppy mixed drink into the blender and pressing the setting for light juice more violently than he intended. "This is the part where I snap and tell you that you don't know anything about me, and you say, oh, but wouldn't you like to, and then I take you back to my place and fuck you, because there's no way in hell I'd go back to yours, and maybe we hit it off or maybe we don't, but after a few fucks or a few weeks you're bored with what a cliched millennial stereotype I am, and I'm ready to try out all those first-person shooter skills on you in real life, because all that quirky charm you used to get me into bed masks a shallowness I find intolerable and a wardrobe that needs to be burned in oil, and you decide we should just call it quits before we wind up regretting the whole thing. But why don't we just make our lives easier by regretting it now?" The blender finished its cycle. Arthur yanked the mixture out and poured it into the plastic cup, then slammed a straw in it and thrust it into the hands of the man he definitely wasn't going home with.

"Either way," he ended, "we'll always have the goddamn pink drink from Starbucks."

He expected a tremor of satisfaction as the man whose advances he had spurned visibly deflated. Instead, he got a, "Hmm. Taste this," and the long green straw was being slipped into Arthur's mouth. 

Arthur tried to protest and took a sip before he could stop himself.

Then he took another. And another.

His eyes fluttered shut, but not before he saw the ambassador of pink drinks tilt his head and regard him with a look that was not quite a smirk, not quite wonder, and Arthur was suddenly ready to forgive him for everything from the moment he walked in the door. He felt a little like he was living out the moment in Pleasantville when the world suddenly burst into color for the first time.

And that color was fucking pink.

Aware of the irony, Arthur heard himself emit a sound that absolutely was not a whimper and took one more glorious sip before wrenching his lips away from the cup and shoving it back.

The pink-drink ambassador refused to take it back, however.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" he asked. Arthur blinked at him. "My name," said the man. "You're supposed to write it on the cup."

"Oh," said Arthur. 

Arthur hesitated. He knew where the sharpie was. All he had to do was reach for it. Nothing would come of it, probably. Maybe he wouldn't even write down his number. Maybe the man would have a stupid name. Maybe Arthur should address the drink to "Sprinkled Donut" and never look back.

They stared at one another.

"Arthur? What are you doing, you know we don't allow customers behind the counter."

Arthur paled and felt his blood pressure drop as surely as if he hadn't just been about to walk out of the store for good. Of course Cobb would finally get off the phone now. And now, of course, this guy would probably think Arthur was the kind of person who threatened to quit five times a day and never followed through. 

"Dom," he said, turning to see Cobb squinting at him, a perplexed furrow forming between his brows. "I was just, uh—"

"You were...?" Cobb said. Arthur hated when he got all smug and smarmy like this, the prick.

"I was — showing my boyfriend around," Arthur blurted. And then he wanted to die. He didn't have to turn around to feel the way the gaze of his not!boyfriend suddenly prickled the back of his neck with interest.

"Your  _boyfriend_?" Cobb asked incredulously. He didn't quite snort, but Arthur answered him indignantly all the same.

"What? You know I'm gay."

And now Cobb did snort. "Since when do you have time to have a boyfriend?" he asked. "You're always  _here_."

 _And whose fault would that be?_ Arthur didn't retort. "Since I met..." he scrambled to think of a name and suddenly hit upon the only petty vengeance available to him for this whole absurd situation. "Pavel... Pavel Nikolaevich." He paused and then added for effect: "He's Russian."

He wasn't sure what he was expecting to happen, but it wasn't for the lumberjack to immediately edge past him and lunge forward to shake Cobb's hand vigorously.

"Da, my apolozhees," said Arthur's not!boyfriend in a perfectly fluid Russian accent. "Zis, it is all my fault, nyet? It is sllow day and so I persuade Arzur here to show me ze—how do you say in Engolish—ze coffeemaker."

He turned back at Arthur and grinned a toothy, wide grin before slipping his arm familiarly around Arthur's waist. His voice had dropped and evened out like some kind of slow stream over a gravelly bedrock, and it took a suspiciously long moment for Arthur to recover enough to register that Cobb was staring back and forth between them, waiting for Arthur to say something. Before he got a chance however, Cobb noticed Arthur's apron lying on the counter, and his gaze sharpened.

 _Great_ , Arthur thought. _Just great._ One of Cobb's strictest rules was never taking off the apron. He was going to see the apron and the key ring and put two and two together, and then Arthur would never be able to get a fucking job in this town again. What had he been _thinking?_

He braced for the worst, but when he looked over at the counter, the key ring was gone. After a momentary lost heartbeat of panic, Arthur slid his hand as casually as he could into his jeans pocket.

Holy shit. Who _was_  this guy?

Following Cobb's glance, the technicolor lumberjack Russian pickpocket reached for the apron and proceeded to slip it back around Arthur's waist while Arthur tried desperately to look as if gorgeous built Europeans manhandled him every day. "Ah, zat is allzo my fault," he said, never letting that gorgeous accent slip. "Arzur, my little kotyenok, he is shy, yes? You vwerk my sladkaya yagodka zo hard, no? So I try to make him more comfortable. Is all good, ya?"

Cobb was squinting again, but he seemed more confused than mad, so Arthur leaned into his reverse pickpocketer's side. "Just taking a bit of a break, Dom." He slid an arm around the thick torso next to him. (Muscles. Gnffh.) Cobb was starting to look mildly placated. "Sorry about the apron, won't happen again." 

"Huh," said Dom. "See that it doesn't."

"Nyz to myet you," said Pavel.

The two of them stood leaning into each other as Cobb shrugged and headed back into the manager's office. 

"So," said Arthur's pink flamingo savior a moment later, British once more. He separated from Arthur, but only just. "Arthur, hmm?"

His hand was still light on Arthur's waist. Arthur wanted it there. 

He reached for the sharpie and the damn pink drink. "I didn't catch your name," he said, uncapping the marker. "Mr...?"

The man looked down at the drink in Arthur's hand, and laughed.

____

When Arthur finished his shift, he calmly clocked out, took his apron off, and made out with Eames out in the back alley until his ears were as pink as his lips, stained as they were from all that strawberry juice, and the plush heat of Eames' mouth against his.

"I took you for a man of little imagination at first," Eames purred, tucking Arthur even closer against the hard contours of his chest and thighs. "But no one that visibly aroused by a Starbucks smoothie can be anything short of inspired."

"Technically it's not a smoothie," Arthur said, hooking his leg around Eames' calf. "More like a light frappucino."

"You do know your menu," Eames said approvingly, nipping his neck.

"I take pride in my work." Arthur hummed and arched back to give him more access. 

"Good thing, too. Can't have you failing to live up to your customer's lofty expectations."

"Wait a moment." Arthur pulled back and eyed him. "Did you even taste your drink?"

Eames made a show of looking startled, then sheepish. "Well, you seemed rather thirsty."

Arthur narrowed his eyes. "Do you even _like_ strawberry?" 

"Bloody hell, no," Eames scoffed. "All that sugar? Disgusting. You just looked so fed up with your life I decided to order the most obnoxious thing I could think of solely to piss you off." He smirked. "And aren't I lucky it worked."

Arthur considered being pissed all over again, but found he had much better things to do, most of them regarding Eames' mouth and his hands.

All in all, it had been a most excellent day, and for once Arthur just couldn't be pressed.

____

Arthur wasn't even pressed later that night, when Cobb interrupted him in the middle of some very enthusiastic sex to tell him that "Pavel" had stolen all of the money out of the till.

**Author's Note:**

>   * Russian!Eames calls Arthur "my little kitten" :D and "my sweet little berry," respectively :D
>   * Song title is, of course, borrowed from [Aerosmith.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfbBqBOSXlU)
>   * [Go make your own Pink Drink!](http://www.hungry-girl.com/go-to-guides/four-things-starbucks-pink-drink)
>   * It is my first coffeeshop AU! :D
> 



End file.
